Quotes from Herman Melville

Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.

Instinct and study, love and hate; Audacity-reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's heart, To wrestle with the angel -- Art.

Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be it, then!

An uncommon prudence is habtual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide.

I try all things; I achieve what I can.

The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.

With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this.

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence. (Moby Dick Chapter lxxix p345)

and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.

But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.

For this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.

The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

Thus, gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must not for that very reason infallibly be faulty.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like.

The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.

And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

love is profane, since it mortally reaches toward the heaven in ye!

It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.— It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time.

It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood loosing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power that first moved it is withdrawn.

For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blankets between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have broken his digester.

loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses